


She Is the Dream From Which I Cannot Awaken

by Zagzagael



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 16:17:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/750479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zagzagael/pseuds/Zagzagael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Small character study...</p>
            </blockquote>





	She Is the Dream From Which I Cannot Awaken

He did not enjoy sleep. The unconscious form was unsettling and he preferred to avoid it. Of course, he struggled with his own body memory of sleeping the sleep of the daggered. And the now countless bodies he had let fall into their own dark slumber. He recognized all of that, but there was more. How sleep was the cousin of death, how the dead could project the illusion of sleep. He detested that. It frightened him.

The first dead body he could remember seeing had been a child. A stillborn child his mother had helped deliver into this unforgiving world. He had been a child himself, assisting his mother by accompanying her to keep watch over the sleeping children, their dreams perhaps visited by their dead sibling as she slipped her brief mortal coil. He didn’t know then that he would be ghosted by the dead babe for hundreds and thousands of dreams. He thought the newborn was sleeping, still as the foal he had seen born, stunned and wrapped in caul….but his mother shook her head at him when he had drawn in a gasp, a kind of sacred exhilaration.

The fire-lit room, sleep, and death, and blood and soft cries. He remembered the mother had held the baby for hours and his own mother had let her rock the corpse, he had listened as his mother told the bereft father, until she doesn't need to hold the child anymore, let her….And when she didn't need to hold it anymore his mother had taken it from her and spooned an elixir to the distraught woman that called her own dreaming in. She then washed the fragile-skinned dead thing and wrapped it like a gift and set it in the box the father had lashed together. And outside, in the wild dark, a storm broke the tops out of trees he climbed with his siblings.

He remembered this. He had reached out his own small hand and touched the hand of the dead babe. If he closed his eyes, the feeling of small finger bones beneath thin skin could be summoned, running up his own fingers, the length of his arm, and lodging like a fist inside his heart.

Ten centuries later and his fears were still fattened by a child who had never even breathed air.

He was trying, very hard, not to sleep. Resting was different and he worked on this art with delectable single-malt whisky’s and bourbons, settling into overstuffed rubbed leather chairs, exquisite Italian shoes on his feet kicked up on mahogany tables. Fingers ringed with silver and gold, crystal tumblers of alcohol, and the dulling of thought and memory. That he enjoyed.

Lying down was something he avoided at all costs. Now. Again.

There had been a brief span of months with Katerina, summoned, called, beckoned, drawn, it didn't matter what verb he visualized when thinking of how they had come together. He had lain down with her; in motel rooms, in penthouse kings, on Persian carpets, in meadows of crushed flowers. Time over, he had allowed his body to fall to prone with her body. He had wrapped her in his arms and in turn been held. He had felt his eyes slide closed, his body sated and nearly boneless with a kind of physical love he had denied himself for decades, his mouth burning, lips swollen, fangs venomous with dripping lust and his mind a viper for love.

But all of that was over now, finished, faded into a memory like a dream. He was alone, again. She was gone, of course. He had been challenged and he had turned away. Lying down with her was opening his body to the white oak stake, it was taking the last breath, it was turning to stone and letting go. It was the black dream, the dark descent. She was the ghost of someone else long dead in a corporeal body she had shared with him, but he wanted something else.

He wanted to stay awake.


End file.
